Edmund Burke and the First Stuart Revolution Philip Connell
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Journal of British Studies 59 (July 2020): 463–494. doi:10.1017/jbr.2020.40 © The North American Conference on British Studies, 2020. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecom- mons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work Edmund Burke and the First Stuart Revolution Philip Connell Abstract This essay reconsiders the character and significance of Edmund Burke’s atti- tude to the seventeenth-century civil wars and interregnum. Burke may have venerated the “revolution principles” of 1688–89 over those of the 1640s, not least in the Reflec- tions on the Revolution in France in which he notoriously compares English dissenting radicals to regicidal Puritans. Yet his response to the first Stuart revolution is more complex than has commonly been allowed and is closely bound up with Burke’s earlier parliamentary career as a prominent member of the Rockingham Whig connec- tion. The revival of an anti-Stuart idiom within the extra-parliamentary opposition of the 1760s, together with the mounting conflict with the North American colonies, gave renewed prominence to the memory of the civil wars within English political dis- course. The Rockinghamites attempted to exploit this development—without compro- mising their own, more conservative reading of seventeenth-century history—but they were also its victims. In the years that followed, Burke and his colleagues were repeatedly identified by their political opponents with the spirit of Puritan rebellion and Cromwell- ian usurpation. These circumstances provide a new perspective on Burke’s interpretation of the nation’s revolutionary past; they also offer important insights into his writings and speeches in response to the French Revolution. ike any observant reader of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in LFrance, James Gillray quickly realized that many of Burke’s most provoca- tive conclusions derived from his interpretation of English political and constitutional history. These latter subjects were accordingly given center stage in Gillray’s satirical interpretation of the work, which appeared just a few weeks after the publication of the Reflections and which remains perhaps the best-known visual response to Burke’s text (figure 1). Gillray’s Smelling out a Rat depicts an outsized Burkean proboscis, surmounted by giant spectacles, discovering the intrigues of the homegrown “Atheistical-Revolutionist” Richard Price, whose 1789 sermon to the Revolution Society in London’s Old Jewry was the target of sustained pejorative commentary in the Reflections. Price and his audience had of course been commem- orating the anniversary of the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which he treated as a precedent for recent events in America and France. In Gillray’s print, however, Price sits beneath a depiction of Charles I’s execution in 1649, within a gilded frame inscribed “the Glory of Great Britain.” The clear allusion is to Burke’s allegation that “these gentlemen of the Old Jewry, in all their reasonings on the Revolution of 1688, have a revolution which happened in England about forty years before, Philip Connell is a reader in literature and history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Selwyn College. He is grateful to colleagues at Cambridge and to conference audiences in Florida and Oxford for their comments and advice. Please direct any correspondence to [email protected]. 463 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 01 Oct 2021 at 06:47:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2020.40 464 ▪ CONNELL Figure 1—James Gillray, Smelling out a Rat; or The Atheistical Revolutionist Disturbed in his Midnight Calculations (London, 3 December 1790), British Museum (hereafter BM) Sat. 7686. and the late French revolution, so much before their eyes, and in their hearts, that they are constantly confounding all the three together. It is necessary that we should separate what they confound.”1 Burke advances this claim repeatedly in the first part of the Reflections, chiefly through an unflattering comparison of Price with Hugh Peters, the notorious Crom- wellian preacher and regicidal apologist. Price’s sermon on 1688 responded to his own revolutionary age with a culminating nunc dimittis, “for my eyes have seen thy sal- vation.”2 His inspiration, Burke mischievously insinuated, was in fact Peters’s identical scriptural invocation in response to the trial of Charles I.3 Price’s text “differs only in place and time, but agrees perfectly with the spirit and letter of the rapture of 1648.”4 Burke’s references in the Reflections to the civil wars and interregnum—the first Stuart revolution, as it may be designated in contradistinction to that of 1688— thus invite explanation in terms of his growing hostility to the radical dissent of 1 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. C. D. Clark (Stanford, 2001), [21]. Bracketed page references are to the pagination of the first edition of the Reflections (1790), as provided by Clark. 2 Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country [. .] (London, 1789), 49. 3 Luke 2:29–32 (“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: / For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, / Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; / A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.” King James Version); Burke, Reflections, [97–98]. 4 Burke, Reflections, [98]; Sollom Emlyn, ed., A Complete Collection of State-Trials, 2nd ed., 6 vols. (London, 1730), 2:363; John Faulkner, “Burke’s Perception of Richard Price,” in The French Revolution Debate in English Literature and Culture, ed. Lisa Plummer Crafton (Westport, 1997), 1–25. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 01 Oct 2021 at 06:47:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2020.40 EDMUND BURKE AND THE FIRST STUART REVOLUTION ▪ 465 Price and his unitarian allies. Burke’s alarm at Price’s political and religious principles, it has been argued, led him to revive and reapply long-standing anti-Puritan preju- dices, exemplified in David Hume’s identification of the “fanatical spirit” of the 1640s as a solvent for “every moral and civil obligation.”5 But Burke’s critique of English dissent in the Reflections can also be understood to have application to con- temporary France. And, in this case, the secular revolutionary ideology of the philo- sophes reveals a paradoxical affinity with the seditious tendency of seventeenth- century religious enthusiasts. The spiritual self-sufficiency of the Protestant zealot, Burke seems to imply, finds its modern correlative in the autarchic faculty of Enlight- enment reason and its iconoclastic refashioning of inherited laws and institutions.6 As the most authoritative recent overview of Burke’s political thought has argued, the “Reflections, faced with a resurgence of the attitudes of the 1640s, was Burke’s response to what he saw as the specious illumination of fanatics,” albeit repackaged for the eighteenth century by the “false prophets of enlightenment.”7 The modernity of the French experience, its break from previous revolutionary “scripts,” continues to offer a powerful explanatory framework for historians of 1789.8 By contrast, Burke’s insistent recourse to mid-seventeenth-century precedent appears to ground his understanding of the French Revolution in the atavistic categories of regicidal rebellion and Puritan enthusiasm. Yet the civil wars and interregnum also possessed a more proximate significance for Burke, which bore directly upon the ideological identity of his own party. This, at least, is the implication of another, less familiar visual satire on the controversy sparked by the Reflections, James Sayers’s Mr. Burke’s Pair of Spectacles for Short Sighted Politicians, which appeared in May 1791 (figure 2). Sayers’s technical defi- ciencies as a draughtsman have tended to obscure the conceptual sophistication of his work: Mr. Burke’s Pair of Spectacles is in fact an ingenious response not just to Burke but also to Gillray’s Smelling out a Rat. The spectacles that feature so promi- nently in the earlier print are now redirected at Burke’s opposition colleagues, Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, revealing a scene of both constitutional subversion and unsettled temporal perspective. In Gillray’s work, Charles I’s execu- tioner remains firmly within the realm of historical representation; here, however, he is reanimated in the form and posture of Fox, whose axe (inscribed with “Rights of Man”) is directed at the base of a British oak hung with the emblems of crown, church, and nobility. The resultant sense of historical dislocation is further accentu- ated by the fact that, while Fox wears a French cocked hat, the rest of his dress is sug- gestively Cromwellian.9 At the bottom right of the scene, the skeleton of the recently 5 David Hume, The History of England, new ed., corr., 8 vols. (London, 1778), 6:486; John Seed, Dis- senting Histories: Religious Division and the Politics of Memory in Eighteenth-Century England (Edinburgh, 2008), 160–81. 6 J. G. A. Pocock, “Edmund Burke and the Redefinition of Enthusiasm: The Context as Counter-Rev- olution,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, ed. Keith Michael Baker et al., 4 vols.